A man moves from east to west. That’s it. But try to explain its meaning, and things get complicated real fast. People usually focus on the reason–“Why did he do that?” But that question doesn’t sit right with me. I believe there’s a better question. Try, “So what?” When we can’t find meaning in something, we assume there’s none. But often we’ve just forgotten to ask why it mattered. So he did something. What of it?
I had a daydream whose meaning I didn’t understand for a long time. It was about traveling the vast stretch of land that lay between Asia and Europe. Whenever I looked at a world map, the greatly simplified and perfectly colored terrains seemed a little too convenient. And I often found myself making up imaginary paths between two distant places and trying to cross them in my mind. The main question wasn’t about the possibility, but about the choice. I wondered how I would choose to approach the problem in a way that only I would, and how those imaginary roads would uniquely unfold as a result of my own idiosyncratic choices. The paths always shifted in my mind, but the Silk Road always lay at the center of them. I was intrigued by the idea of tracing the steps of those who traveled on that ancient trade route between these continents. I wondered whether I too could see what they had once seen and feel what they had once felt. Behind the abstract shapes of the map lay stories to be heard and told. Although I never knew why I wanted it nor how it mattered, I began forming a vague idea of following these imaginary roads to Europe from Asia someday.
Back home in Sydney, the daydream was gradually losing its clarity in the hum of everyday life and the grind toward my more conventional aspirations. Life rewarded the norm and discouraged the unpredictable. With every step toward my rational ambitions, I surrendered a small piece of my absurd yet interesting ideas. There was no room for the nonsensical in the tiny world that surrounded me. Every day, it felt more and more impossible to just take off for months to chase some lines that I had randomly drawn on a map. So I stopped thinking about them.
Yet the roads somehow found significance once again by chance. I became interested in moving to the United States. It was a natural choice as an engineer, because the United States was the focal point of the technology industry. For a long time, I hadn’t taken any concrete actions because I was apprehensive about letting go of the comfortable lifestyle back home. While an idea of a new life was interesting, the thought of giving up something stable was equally unnerving. But something changed. Whenever the idea of moving to the United States entered my mind, the vision of the imaginary roads started returning. Random paths started appearing on maps again. They told me to accept the uncertainty. They told me that it was fine. So the two daydreams came together, and the wheels of my foolish plan were set in motion–this time with a bit more purpose and clarity. After a couple of months of looking, I found a new position in Seattle, Washington.
I had always envisioned making this trip over a couple of months, but knew that it wasn’t really practical to take off for that long. After all, it was a questionable career move to step away for months from a position I hadn’t even started. This trade-off led to some delicate back-and-forth conversations with the company, and the maximum break I managed to pull off was four weeks. Once the start date was set, the wheels started gaining momentum and turning faster. The immigration process was underway and I was attending visa appointments. As the idea of relocating to the United States started taking on more definite shape, I began feeling the urgency to figure out how I could actually make the trip in the time I had available. Although four weeks was nowhere near what I had imagined to be enough for the trip, I just had to find a way to fit my idea into that reality.
Brainstorming the possible routes was a disappointing exercise because the actual timeline turned out to be even shorter than four weeks. For starters, I couldn’t just land in Seattle and head straight to the office, because I needed time to settle into the new country and find a place to live. I reluctantly decided to set aside two days for all the relocation activities. Obviously, that wasn’t nearly going to be enough, but I was just going to have to make it work by hustling hard after getting to Seattle. Apart from that, I wanted to use the travel opportunity to take my mother to South Korea to pay a visit to an uncle who was ill. So I set aside another two days for going there. It was the right thing to do, although it was mentally difficult to shed additional days from the itinerary. In the end, I was left with a grand total of twenty-four days to not only fulfill my daydream of going from Asia to Europe but also to arrive in Seattle. No matter how I tried, there didn’t seem to be a reasonable way to fit my idea into a mere twenty-four days. There was simply not enough time.
The international relations of the time also introduced challenges. The quickest way to cross from Asia to Europe would have been to take the Trans-Siberian Railway from the Russian Far East to Moscow and to transfer to Europe. But most international trains weren’t operating across the Russian border at the time. Besides, taking the Trans-Siberian Railway all the way sounded a bit too convenient, and what I really wanted to do instead was to go through Central Asia. I was drawn there not only by the expansive Eurasian steppes and distinctive Islamic architecture, but also by the history of Korean compatriots who had been deported there by the Soviet Union. I wanted to meet them and understand their story. To be able to converse with them, I had even been bothering my Russian-speaking colleagues for about a year to practice the language. When I mustered up the courage to try saying things in broken Russian, the reactions of Russian-speakers mainly fell in three camps. Some found my attempt interesting and went out of their way to help. Some were neutral and didn’t make much of my efforts. And some became rather uncomfortable and defensive. Anyway, I continued to practice the language, thanks to the great patience of some helpful colleagues, in the hope that one day I could speak directly with ethnic Koreans in former Soviet countries.
Assuming I could get to Central Asia, there were three paths that led to the doorstep of Europe. All of them came with their own challenges–I could go through Iran or Russia, or across the Caspian Sea. I wasn’t too sure about going through Iran or Russia because there was no time to wait for the visa. In addition, I didn’t want to risk complicating my entry into the United States. This left me with the option of hopping on a ship to cross the Caspian Sea. But that wasn’t possible at the time because Azerbaijan had closed its sea border for entry. So I figured I’d have to fly across the Caspian Sea, although the caravans of the Silk Road probably didn’t have that option. But ultimately, all this planning didn’t actually amount to much because it was simply not possible to plan the exact routes. There were just too many moving parts with too little information available. It was often not obvious how to get from one point to another, especially with my limited timeframe.
Since it was impossible to have an exact plan, the best thing to do was choose the starting and ending locations and just hit the road. The destination was easy to pick because, for some inexplicable reason, I could easily picture it as Dublin. It just seemed remote on the map, and I was attracted by the challenge of reaching it. On the other hand, it took some time to settle on the starting location. Many of my imaginary routes started from Singapore, but the path from Singapore to Central Asia required too many layovers and would take too long. Given the limited timeframe, I wanted to find a way to reduce the number of moving parts in the transportation. It was then that I discovered that China had announced a visa-free entry policy for Australians. The size of China felt rather intimidating but I figured crossing it wouldn’t be too bad given its railway infrastructure. Besides, it was practically next door to Seoul, where I would fly to first. So I decided that I would start from its capital, Beijing.
On October 3rd, 2024, I set off from Sydney with a backpack, an idea of somehow going from Beijing to Dublin through Central Asia, and the hope of starting a new life in the United States. So what caused a man to chase the imaginary roads from east to west? Because his daydreams converged on those roads. Why this foolish pursuit mattered was another question that hadn’t even entered my mind yet. But at that point, the search for meaning didn’t seem all that important. Only the choice of taking the first step seemed to be of greatest importance, no matter the reason or the meaning. After spending a day visiting relatives in South Korea, I prepared to leave for Beijing on the morning of October 5th.